Treasures Among the Junk

I spent most of yesterday morning sick in bed. As usual, the 'just 15 minutes' on the computer turned into a few hours, and I found myself cleaning out my email files. Nowhere in my life does junk accumulate faster than in my email inbox. If you are like me at all, you started out with one email address. Then, either because of spam or what have you, you got another one. Well, soon it all adds up, and if it isn't enough that you have physical mail to sort through, now there are 5 different email addresses, all accumulating junk of their own.

So I spent a good part of the morning sorting through them...what to file, what to delete. But the cool surprise in this tedious chore was realizing that a lot of what I kept in my inbox to go through at another time (which never happens) was worth saving. There was a reason I didn't just delete it. Some were articles, others were quotations, others were devotionals, others were emails I needed to answer (oops on that one). But it sort of was like a stroll down memory lane, looking at the dates and trying to remember where I was at in my life when that email meant something to me, enough so that I didn't just hit 'delete.'

I'm a huge fan of throwing things out and I hate clutter. But in this case, I decided to file alot of those emails instead of deleting them. True, I may never look at those folders again, but what's the harm? It's not like it is taking up space. And maybe in a chance moment, I'll stumble across those treasures among the junk, and maybe they'll speak to me once more.

Here's a few bits of wisdom I stumbled upon for the second time:

"Relationships are difficult, time-consuming, baffling, and sometimes heartbreaking. They're also what make life worth living." --Martha Beck

"Even when love isn't enough...somehow it is." -- Stephen King

"Security in a relationship lies neither in looking back to what it was in nostalgia, nor forward to what it might be...but living in the present relationship and accepting it as it is now." -- Anne Morrow Lindbergh

"If you lose hope, somehow you lose the vitality that keeps life moving, you lose that courage to be, that quality that helps you go on in spite of it all. And so today I still have a dream."
-- Martin Luther King, Jr.

Just a few treasures I found among the junk... and some from unlikely sources (Stephen King???)

Never know what you're gonna find when you do a little cleaning...